William Blake Hecate or the Three Fates 1795
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
[Cassius, in “Julius Caesar”, Act I, Scene II]
The stars, the fates, Hecate, Parcae, Fata, the norns, the three sisters, they’re us, and we should start acting like we know it.
The Transportation Safety Administration can’t give us security; it’s in our hands. All of the grotesque, costly, and invasive measures the TSA has already introduced, or might still introduce, are only reactive, and cannot match the efficacy of the initiatives which a look at the broader geopolitical picture would demand. We should also remember that all the current fuss is about passenger air travel, which is only a tiny portion of our national security responsibilities.
The only comprehensive security measure that makes any sense, and which incidentally would be acceptable to, if not applauded by, the entire world (including air travelers everywhere) would be an elimination of the cause, not a continual search for the effect of the intense resentment and hatred behind suicidal and other terrorist acts.
We should begin by looking at ourselves as others see us. We should end all of our current, totally optional wars, close the U.S. military bases and operations currently located within�well over 130 countries, and begin to show a decent respect for the cultures of other peoples.�
Of course it would also be helpful if we could actually bring ourselves to extend real foreign aid, not military hardware, and only where it can be constructive, not where we believe we can buy love or increase our own wealth.�
[image from poor old dirt farmer]
Category: Politics
kill this fake “healthcare overhaul”
cover of Tom Tomorrow’s “The Future’s So Bright I Can’t Bear to Look”
Just kill it. Put it out of [our] misery, now.
It’s been both appalling and nationally embarrassing to watch the healthcare “debate” turn out to have been a flimflam all along. We’ve been punked. Let’s admit it.
In a speech he gave to the AFL-CIO in 2003 [link includes video] Obama said:
I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that�s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that�s what I�d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.
Regardless of whether he was actually sincere at the time, in his statements since being elected he’s moved from single payer to the red herring, “public option” to something like, “yeah, well, whatever”, as long as he can pretend it’s “change”.
Today, the health care industry is not only back in charge, it’s on top, and if anything like either of the bills currently alive in Congress manages to pass, it will have made out like bandits. It’s what it does; it’s all about money, and it’s what its investors demand, but it’s not what the people asked for, not what they need, and it’s not what why they voted for a Democratic President and a strong Democratic majority in both houses.
Howard Dean begins his Washington Post op-ed piece of today:
If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill. Any measure that expands private insurers’ monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform. Real reform would insert competition into insurance markets, force insurers to cut unnecessary administrative expenses and spend health-care dollars caring for people. Real reform would significantly lower costs, improve the delivery of health care and give all Americans a meaningful choice of coverage. The current Senate bill accomplishes none of these.
“Health care” simply cannot be about the health of corporations and investors (there are alternative careers and earning sources, even if their numbers are shrinking as Health care assumes an ever larger share of the American GDP). We’ve been plugging away at real reform for almost a century now, battling greed and its fictions about socialism throughout. Simply nothing works better for everyone than single payer, and that’s a fact.
[image via Cover Browser]
the last soldier to die for Obama’s image
HOW DO YOU ASK A SOLDIER
TO BE THE LAST SOLDIER TO DIE
FOR A PRESIDENT’S POLITICAL IMAGE?
I’ve taken some liberty with David Sirota’s phrasing in the title of his blog post today, but I’m totally with his meaning, having pounded on that wall myself two days ago.
After discussing and then easily dismissing alternative explanations for Obama’s decision to extend and expand our eight-year-long military effort to subdue or occupy Afghanistan, and before asking the question contained in his headline, Sirota poses and answers his own question about the President’s Afghan “surge”:
Is it really worth putting 100,000 Americans at risk for the next few years exclusively to protect the political image of a president? More specifically, is it worth putting those 100,000 American lives on the line so that President Obama can fulfill the media and political establishment’s artificial definition of “strength”?
I certainly don’t think so, and I think it’s an almost unprecedented level of immorality [my emphases].
[this is the first post in a very, very long time for which I have not uploaded some image, either my own or that of someone else, which I would credit within these brackets; this time I felt that the subject itself was too obscene, its implications to graphic, to be captioned with anything so direct, and yet so particular, as a picture, and I thought no image could match the imagination of the reader]
minaret envy: Swiss suddenly terrified of certain steeples
minaret and church tower in Wangen bei Olten, in the northern Swiss canton of Solothurn
Tell me again: Why is this a problem?
[image from AFP, via Spiegel]
so it’s to be more war.
Max Ernst Europe After the Rain II 1940-1942 oil on canvas 21.5″ x 58.25″
It’s what we do.
For a while, I actually had hope he might do the right thing, although I realize now I had no reason to think so. Consequently, when the news finally came it made me physically sick: There will be more war, much more war. And the reason we’re being given? Because we’re at war.
Does he think we’re all fools? Are we?
It was entirely fake: The endless reports over the past four months which had some of us believing that Obama was agonizing about what to do with the war in Afghanistan. I don’t believe he ever intended to end this nation’s disastrous, and possibly fatal, misadventures in Afghanistan (and where will we go next?), and there’s no reason to believe he ever considered anything other than the mindless policy of escalation General McChrystal ordered his faint-hearted commander to undertake four months ago. The fact that it took Obama so long to order tens of thousands of additional troops to join one more Western fools mission in the Middle East does not reflect intelligence, judgment or compassion, only cowardice, not least since the order was given even before the grand public announcement he will deliver at West Point tonight, that sacred heart of the military establishment (shades of Bush – but what is this President afraid of?).
I wrote here about my distrust of our newly-elected President over a year ago. Eventually my skepticism grew into disgust, and I wrote about Obama’s disastrous record as President, listing dozens of the promised, anticipated or implied reforms that were to come with the new administration but which were not accomplished. I stopped counting the “un-change” months ago, and I’ve seen nothing that might alter my opinion of our President’s incompetence, or wrongheadedness (I’m not sure which it is).
I think the latest and best assessment of our Chief Executive, now as a public officer who has failed the crucial test of a Commander-in-Chief, is contained in this awesome piece by Michael Brenner.
The first and last paragraphs are:
The sham Afghanistan strategic review is now revealed for the empty exercise it always was. Escalation was inescapable, for Obama’s staunch promotion of a ‘necessary war’ precluded a serious reappraisal of stakes and risks. Reversing himself would have demanded the kind of courage that is wholly foreign to him. So we are left with an open-ended commitment to an unwinnable war. That outcome speaks volumes about the failings of Obama as a leader as much as his impaired judgment.
. . . .
The country is ill served by a president who fails to meet his responsibility for the rigorous, open debate on matters of great consequence that he pledged and that is imperative for avoiding more dismal failure. What is the value of a 150 I.Q. when bereft of wisdom or conviction to guide it? Obama’s audacity in pursuing his ambition is one thing; political and intellectual courage is quite another.
Bob Herbert’s column in today’s Times explains why weak politicians can’t be trusted when they talk (publicly) about war.
[painting from the Wadsworth Atheneum collection; image from different.com]
solving “the German Problem”
Anselm Kiefer Deutschlands Geisteshelden (Germany�s Spiritual Heroes) 1973 oil and charcoal on burlap, mounted on canvas 121″ x 268.5″
Still a home for Dichter und Denker
Schicksalstag.
Five major events in German history* are directly connected to November 9, the most recent being the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty years ago today. Whatever else we make of it, the anniversary of this latest in a series of fateful moments should be a timely reminder, in our contemporary obsession with the present, that everything has a story, if not a reason. Of course I’m talking about history.
“The German Problem”.
Historians don’t record statesmen and diplomats ever speaking of an enduring “French Problem” or a persistent “English Problem” (although I believe Americans should be more aware than we are that the rest of the world is increasingly thinking of an intensifying and abiding “American Problem”), but over hundreds of years, even two thousand years, for the Romans, the Byzantines, the Carolingians, all the Slavs, the French, Poles, the Danes, the Belgians and the Dutch, the Russians, the Balts, even the Spanish, and, irregularly, the British, there was always something on the order of what would eventually be known as “the German Problem”.
The problem was recognized or imagined by non-Germans as the perceived threat of a large and vigorous people without natural borders. The danger was to be minimized by means of policies which would contain the Germans geographically, limit their economic authority, and, by the later nineteenth century, assemble and maintain counterweights to their real or potential power in a united nation-state. It worked pretty well while “Germany” consisted of hundreds of mostly-independent realms (Reiche), and especially during periods when Germans were enduring or recovering from plagues and dynastic battles. The horrible ravages of the Thirty Years War were mostly visited on central Europe (viz., the Germans), but in the midst of the impressive economic and cultural resurgence which followed those religious “crusades” a new player, Prussia, equipped with a modern bureaucracy and a highly-trained standing army, appeared on the field, almost out of nowhere, eventually to succesfully engage with, or seduce, the cultural forces of nationalism in founding the Second German Reich.
Whatever the merits of the proposition, for much of the planet the most important lesson to be learned from two twentieth-century world wars was the imperative of eliminating “the German Problem” once again, and this time for good.
Then suddenly the unexpected, the inexplicable happened, confounding everyone’s expectations. The Berlin wall fell, the Soviet bloc and its system collapsed, Germany was peacefully reunited.
New York Times Berlin Bureau Chief, Nicholas Kulish, in a piece in the paper two days ago quoted Robert E. Hunter, senior adviser at the RAND Corporation and an ambassador to NATO under President Bill Clinton. Hunter was able to describe the profound significance of what happened in 1989. After recalling the fears of those observing from the outside that the sudden appearance of “this thing in the center of Europe, if it were allowed to become unified, was going to be a cancer once again and lead to Act III of the great European tragedy.” Instead, he continued, “the German problem, which emerged with the unifying of Germany beginning in the 1860s, is one of the few problems in modern history that has been solved.�
Okay, now my eyes were too wet to immediately read further.
Four months after the proclamation of the united German Empire inside the Hall of Mirrors of the occupied Palace of Versailles, the German Austrian composer Johannes Brahms completed a large-scale piece for chorus and orchestra.
Tonight I’m going to be listening to a recording of Brahms’ Schicksalsied to accompany thoughts of the deep sadness and unbridled joy linked with this date. Brahms wrote it after reading a poem by H�lderlin which was included in the author’s 1797 novel of letters, “Hyperion”. The poet had been inspired by the freedom struggle of the Greeks and in these lines he contrasted the glorious world of their ancient gods with a mankind continually threatened by Schicksal (destiny).
The text appears here, in both German and an English translation.
I’ve just now listened to a sample of the Brahms on line and I was reminded of how much of it relates to the music of his near contemporary, the German German composer Richard Wagner, represented at the time of its composition as Brahms’ musical antithesis, that is, defined so by the passionate factions of each. Together they created the Brahms-Wagner “War of the Romantics”, which disfigured musical life in the second half of the nineteenth century, but which, so far as I can tell, resulted in no fatalities.
*
the symbolic collapse of the Revolution of 1848, the collapse of the monarchy in 1918, the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Kristallnacht in 1938, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
[image from lacma]
Bloomberg squeaks in: Obama’s cowardice saves his skin
The White House switchboard lit up with calls from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg�s emissaries several weeks ago with a message that was polite but firm: The mayor is going to win re-election, they said. We think the president should stay out of the race.
lead paragraph of the lead article in the Late Edition of today’s Times
Did Bloomberg really tell Obama he’d better not support Thompson? Did Obama refrain from supporting Thompson because of the Republican mayor’s implied theat? Does Obama need Bloomberg that much? Did Bloomberg need a no-show Obama in order to win?
This whole scenario looked crazy yesterday; today it looks insane.
Bloomberg barely tallied 50% of the vote in a very small turnout, even though he spent $100,000,000 on his campaign. His opponent, with a tiny fraction of that kind of money, was almost unknown to most New York voters, and almost invisible. Days before the election the Times reported that some black New Yorkers didn’t know Thompson was black. Obama stayed away from the campaign, and never even mentioned Thompson by name.
Does anyone doubt that Thompson would have won had Obama made even the smallest exertion to associate himself with the Democratic candidate? With an upset like that Obama, whose popularity has been declining fast lately, would have become a hero everywhere in the nation. As a coward who wouldn’t challenge the billionaire mayor, and his assertion of invulnerability, Obama gets nada; New Yorkers don’t get change; everyone continues to lose hope.
APPENDIX: Anthony Weiner must be kicking himself this morning.
[image, otherwise uncredited, from queenscrap]
vote for Billy Talen
I would argue that Gawker* doesn’t quite go far enough in its condemnation of Bloomberg’s candidacy, since it stops a little too short of suggesting the obvious alternative. I have no hesitation myself in endorsing the Billy Talen for mayor over Thompson. Thompson (unless he’s actually working for a Bloomberg victory) ran an extraordinarily incompetent campaign, and he finally appears to be something of a fool (okay, just for starters, look at where he stands on bike lanes).
Talen is the candidate of a significant political party, the Green Party, but you may never have seen him or heard him; you may not have heard of him: The commercial media ignores Talen and he’s not allowed to participate in their vaunted mayoral debates or in their interviews with the approved candidates. But I’ve heard him talk, of course to crowds, in character as the colorful and truly-righteous Reverend Billy, but also as “layman” Billy in small groups, and to individuals, and he has a better (in both senses) understanding of the city and the world than any of the politicians foisted upon us by the corporations in whose pay they perform, and certainly superior to the small-minded billionaire who blithely, and regularly, buys his high office outright.
Vote for someone tomorrow whose ideas you share. You deserve it; we all deserve it. Talen’s mayoral platform is a dream – unfortunately – but that’s not a bad place to start.
Hell, if I could I’d even endorse him for president – right now – this time confident we’d get change when we voted for it.
*
in a post written by Alex Pareene.
[image from Bradley R. Hughes]
Billy stops Bloomberg, asks “What’re you doing here?”
asking the Mayor what right he has to even be on the platform
Green Party candidate Reverend Billy Talen was at the mayoral debate last night. He hadn’t been invited to participate as a candidate, since our fake-democratic system only gives full recognition office seekers who have attracted serious money from corporate interests expecting payoffs – or very serious money from themselves in the case of one of the two politicos running this fall.
Our current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, the super rich guy, had been barred from seeking a third term by two city-wide referendums, but he managed to do a cynical end run around them by manipulating a vote by the members of the City Council (very “interested” parties themselves) which we were told took precedence over the popular will. Almost like how spending $10,000 a minute on your mayoral campaign gives a candidate precedence over mere mortals.
When Bloomberg began to speak Talen interrupted him, shouting, “What are you doing here? We voted for term limits!”
More from Billy himself here.
[image from Rev. Billy’s campaign site]
Obama given Nobel Peace prize? I thought it was a joke
“Coloso” is more than a condemnation of war; it’s an allegory of French imperialism, and as such it also condemns every previous or succeeding imperial crusade, regardless of the real or professed idealism of their apologists
NOTE: Obama had been president for less than twelve full days before nominations for the Nobel closed on February 1.
War is not peace.
I looked at my mail today while I waited for my browser to load, and there I read a note from a friend in Buenos Aires who knows me very well. He was effectively warning me that I should sit down before looking at today’s news. Once securely seated, I went to my news page where I saw the announcement, “President Barack Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize”. I thought it was a joke. Totally.
What peace? He’s adopted every one of Bush’s wars, extended some, and if you look closely, he’s not even talking about ending them.
It’s an insult to those who have received the honor in the past, many of whom risked their lives for peace and who did not ride around in armored cars while commanding the greatest arsenal of weapons in the history of the human race – and using them.
It’s like giving the mayor’s son a Ph.D soon after he’s started his freshman year, because he’s said he’s somewhat interested in reading. He’s been tossing everyone’s books into a dumpster since he arrived, but maybe the sheepskin will turn things around. Disgusting.
ADDENDUM: On his own site, candidate for mayor Reverend Billy Talen writes eloquently of the Obama peace prize: “So – it has come to this. War has finally captured Peace. “.
Predator drones will be released tonight destroying the word we always depended on. The flying bomb will go out over the villages, sailing over the sleeping children and prayers and friends stopping for a laugh. The bombs will float and hesitate and change direction from computers in Florida and Missouri and the soldiers at the computers will know that Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And so they will be consumers of a war that is now being marketed as a product named Peace.
[image of “Coloso” (painted by Goya or by one of his friends and pupils) from redstateelectric]